Thanks for your reply. I didn't intervene in the directory structure at all as far as I remember, but anyway I renamed the directory where it was, and ran the installation .exe again. (This was lyx-1.3.5-win32-nc.exe) with the following result: in C: I now have C:\lyx which contains bin, lib, man, share, tmp directories. I did nothing- the exe did this. The C:\lyx\bin subdirectory contains the lyx.exe program. In the c:\lyx\share subdirectory I find 2 more sub-subdirectories, one called locale (which seems to have a lot of other language stuff) and another called lyx (so this is c:\lyx\share\lyx ) which has packages.lst and textclass.lst files in. Neither is empty. The first four lines of textclass.lst are typical of the rest, and look like this-:
"IEEEtran" "IEEEtran" "article (IEEEtran)" "true" "aa" "aa" "article (A&A)" "false" "aapaper" "aa" "article (A&A V4)" "false" "aastex" "aastex" "article (AASTeX)" "true" When I run lyx, I still get the same error. I tried copying lyx.exe to the same directory as the textclass.lst files, and it was just the same. I tried copying the entire contents of the c:\lyx\share\lyx subdirectory to teh same place as the lyx.exe (ie, C:\lyx\bin) and it made no difference. The error still says LyX wasn’t able to find any layout description Check the contents of the file “textclass.lst” Sorry, has to exit I'm way out of my depth here. Thanks for any help you may be able to give. Richard Paul A. Rubin wrote: > Richard Brown wrote: > >> Grateful for help with installing. My level of technical competence is >> advanced idiot, > > > The "advanced" part puts you one up on me. :-) > >> so I've assuredly done something wrong. >> I think I followed the instruction on the wiki exactly. I installed all >> sorts of things one by one and it all looked OK. then at the first >> attempt to run lyx I got this error message: >> >> LyX wasn’t able to find any layout description >> >> Check the contents of teh file “textclass.lst” >> Sorry, has to exit >> >> >> The file exists, and isn't empty, and is the file the installation made, >> and is in c:\lyx\lyx\bin. > > > Are you saying that textclass.lst is in the bin directory?? Did you > start LyX from the bin directory? Is packages.lst in the bin directory > as well (and does it have non-zero length)? > >> The whole program is in c:\lyx\lyx > > > Just to confirm your directory structure, lyx.exe is in > c:\lyx\lyx\bin, right? > >> I'm using win xp pro on an amd 1300 with 128 RAM and loads and loads of >> free disk space. > > > AFAIK, LyX and all helper programs are completely agnostic with > respect to the processor. You're a brave soul to run XP Pro on a > system with only 128MB of RAM, though. (But that doesn't account for > the problem at hand.) > > I'm with the others on this thread -- I'd stick with LyX 1.3.5 for > now, rather than become an alpha tester for 1.3.6. > > FYI, LyX creates a variety of files (including textclass.lst) in your > "home" directory (which is either the directory from which it is > started or the directory specified in Edit | Preferences | Paths | > Working directory (once you get into LyX and set some preferences). It > also creates a subdirectory tree under that directory. To minimize > clutter, if for no other reason, I'd advise creating a base document > directory (for instance, c:\lyx\documents) and starting it from there. > I don't know any reason why it would have trouble finding > textclass.lst in the bin directory if that's where it was started, but > then I've never tried that (and don't intend to). > > -- Paul > > >
